The Art of Living in Community...
Thinking about Education, School, Teaching and Learning. What ideas do we have about the future and how do these inform our actions in the present?
How might we engage, act and think differently?
“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I often wonder about who we are as teachers and who we are becoming. Both collectively and as individuals. That our 'Teaching as inquiry' although is about furthering success for students, it is also about who we are and who we are becoming as teachers.

Robert Evan's discusses the role of collegial and congenial relationships in our schools.

Collegial relationships:"... requires a focus on development and performance. It means sharing — deprivatizing — the work of teaching, and it means talking candidly, and being able to disagree constructively, about professional practice."

"The forging and sustaining of a truly collegial, collaborative ethos in a faculty means confronting deeply embedded structural and personal challenges." Evans

Congenial relationships are: about getting along well, being friendly, warm, and supportive. "By itself, it fosters a culture of niceness and privacy, not a culture of growth." Evans

I'm wonder if it really is time we interrupted the culture of being nice in the staffroom and started setting the conditions for some thing a little bit more gritty.

Like the Christchurch Outer spaces project. Fomison's No! was only said out loud, outside within the commons when an earthquake totally shook and disrupted everything. When Fomison's No! could no longer be seen indoors, it was taken outside.

When I think about Education I think about verbs like warmth of Interaction, commoning and nod-ing (if such a word exists!)
"Node. The point of rest between two wave motions of a vibrating string etc."
The New Oxford Companionship to Music
Vol 2 K-Z
Denis Arnold 1983
Oxford University Press